Quite a few newbies to websites make BIG mistakes regarding their rules or terms of use. Avoiding the following common mistakes will increase your website's chance of success:

-Bullet Rules Not only is a short, simple list of your rules confusing enough, some people mistakingly use slang that some of their visitors might not understand:

No Spamming

No Flaming

-Super-Strict It's extremely easy to be very strict without realizing it, which, depending on the type of website, can lose you a whole lot of visitors. You don't want your visitors to be bullied or treated unfairly, but be careful not to over do it if someone gets into an arguement or does something that you don't really appreciate.

-Over-Official Some people like to take a wall of text from another website, or simply act as if they're some big corporation, which never fails to scare away your visitors, especially if you leave another website's name in the stolen content!

-Mind Reading Members They don't exist! You cannot enforce or even expect people to follow a rule that wasn't put into writing or put in an easy to find place. Very carefully choose what you want people to be able to do and how you want them to behave and be sure to make it easy to find!